An Adventure with Kazuya Sano, an Entrepreneur from Okhotsk

NHK Hokkaido's "Local Friends" program is gaining attention for letting local people take the lead in TV production and even get involved in community development. This adventure began in a pub, where a blond-haired entrepreneur handed over a "proposal"—
Hello, I'm Ryo Osumi, a director at NHK.
This time, I'd like to introduce a friend who created the opportunity for local people and NHK Hokkaido to co-create. At first, I was nervous, thinking he might be an intimidating person, but after reading his edgy proposal, my heart pounded even more...

This is the behind-the-scenes story of the creation of "Local Friends Homestay Diary" and "Local Friends News," two unusually produced segments broadcast on NHK Hokkaido's evening news program, "Hot News Hokkaido."

"It's not the shoes."
"Huh? It's not the shoes?"
"It's the way you walk. Not the shoes."

On a December night, the roads in Sapporo are frozen solid.
Having just transferred from Tokyo, I learned this fact the hard way—by falling over.

On that night in December 2019, I was walking through Sapporo's entertainment district alongside a group of seasoned Hokkaido veterans. I struggled to keep up with them, as even their way of walking was different from mine.

The after-party for a study session on a certain movement in Hokkaido had begun. As we moved from the first bar to the second, I was getting pleasantly tipsy. In a corner of the lively gathering, I found myself face-to-face with a young man with blond hair. His name was Kazuya Sano. He was a 29-year-old entrepreneur from Engaru, a town in the Okhotsk region, the "top right" part of Hokkaido.

After I had been talking for a while,
"Could you wait here a minute?"
he said, and disappeared from the pub. When he returned, he was holding a document he had just printed at a convenience store.

It was a nine-page proposal.
"So, what is this 'Local Friends' thing?"
On a cold winter night, in a pub, I received a piping-hot proposal.
It was actually NHK Hokkaido that had first suggested teaming up with local people.

We were feeling a strong sense of crisis. Every year, the industry pays close attention to a figure called the "weekly reach rate"—the percentage of people who watch TV for five minutes or more in a week. We were disheartened by the score for people in their 20s. In 2008, it was 92 out of 100 people, but by 2018, it had plummeted to 67 (from the 2019 National Individual Audience Rating Survey). The shape of the graph looked like a landslide.

Even more serious was the decline in trust in the media.

I was once bluntly asked by a university student during a job interview, "Isn't the TV industry just 'mass trash' (a derogatory term combining 'mass media' and 'trash')?" To be honest, it scared me, but an attitude of "indifference at best, sometimes distrust" towards the mass media is spreading, especially among the younger generation.

Then, in 2019, when a new employee assigned to NHK Hokkaido confessed that they couldn't tell their friends they had gotten a job at NHK,
"This is it. We've hit rock bottom."
I felt we were compelled to rebuild the relationship between the media and society.

Amidst this, a reform group of young and mid-career employees at NHK Hokkaido was trying to shift our mindset from "viewers to partners." I was a member of that group. Simply put, it was a strategy for the TV station and citizens to build a relationship of trust by creating content together, rather than the station unilaterally producing and delivering it.

And the first partners we chose were people known as "local players."
At the time, the term "local player" was gradually coming into use. According to an explanation in the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper, it refers to "people who are active in the communities where they live and are trying to create new value" (from the online edition of February 7, 2020, by Ryota Hattori). Many are from the younger generation and come from diverse backgrounds, including photographers, writers, guesthouse owners, and entrepreneurs.

I started attending events where these so-called local players were speaking.
"I think if a TV station and local players teamed up, we could do something interesting."
I would say this as I handed out my business card, connecting with them loosely on Facebook and starting casual conversations.

One day, I posted a message to a group of local players: "I'm thinking of featuring local players on the NHK website."

Just as I was about to take the first step onto a glorious new page of co-creation, a reply came from Kazuya Sano.
Co-creation isn't easy.
Kazuya Sano runs his own web media, "Okhotsk-to," which focuses on the Okhotsk region. He's the kind of person whose blog post as a third-year university student, titled "My Unemployed Father and the Future of the Countryside," got 50,000 page views in a single day. He certainly didn't seem to be struggling with his web presence.
The reply continued.
My reaction to reading this was,
"There's no way we can make something like that so easily."

It would be great if we could feature the activities of local players on air, but getting a proposal approved within the station requires substantial content, and actually producing a program is a huge amount of work. I couldn't easily say yes.

We had cheerfully declared we would become partners, but we had no idea what to do...

This stalemate would be broken by a certain "incident."

"Marathon and Race Walk Courses to be in Sapporo"
On November 1, 2019, the IOC suddenly announced that the Tokyo Olympics race walk and marathon courses would be moved from Tokyo to Sapporo.

Immediately, a problem arose. Some information programs on commercial TV networks in Tokyo began broadcasting with the narrative that . For example, on TBS's "Hiruobi!," they looked at the Sapporo course on Google Street View and commented that there was "nothing there" and the "scenery is monotonous."
In response, people who felt uncomfortable with the program started posting on social media.
Messages like "It's so annoying to watch them laugh and say whatever they want, like there's nothing here just because it's in Sapporo," appeared one after another.

These voices eventually grew louder, leading to a movement using the hashtag "#札幌dis" (#SapporoDis, meaning to diss Sapporo) to counter the mass media that had criticized Sapporo. It was a hellish picture of the mass media criticizing a region, and citizens criticizing the media on social media.
Later, Junichi Takada, a media committee member for the Hokkaido Shimbun, tallied that the #SapporoDis hashtag generated 40,000 tweets, with a total reach of 25 million including retweets. (Hokkaido Shimbun morning edition, December 1, 2019, "Reading the Web: A Great Wave of Support Against Criticism of Sapporo for Olympic Marathon").

It was Hokkaido's "local players" who brilliantly turned this negative movement around. Eifu Koga, a member of the Community-Reactivating Cooperator Squad in Urahoro Town, initiated a movement to reinterpret "dis" (disrespect) as "discover" and started a campaign to share the region's charms with the hashtags "#札幌discover" (#SapporoDiscover) and "#北海道discover" (#HokkaidoDiscover).

In the midst of this, Kazuya Sano sent a message to the members of NHK Hokkaido.

I think this is probably the most impactful thing that local people in Hokkaido can do right now. (Omitted) Since it was started by TV, it might be difficult for NHK Hokkaido to cover it, but if you're interested, please do...! lol

NHK can't cover this, can you?
The message, with its slightly provocative nuance, struck a chord with us.
And so, the anchor of NHK Hokkaido's evening news program covered this movement in a report for their own show.
As for me, I decided to hold a "study session" to gather the people involved and analyze the mechanism by which it had spread.

"Wow, this is amazing! It's my first time inside."
On December 8, about a month after the incident, local players began to gather one after another in Studio 2 of the NHK Sapporo station.
The initiator, Mr. Koga, was about the age of a recent university graduate and had a fresh-faced vibe. He was excited to be inside a TV station. The NHK Sapporo Broadcasting Station, which was expanded for the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, is an aging facility that frequently leaks when it rains. He was amused by its antique design.

Mr. Sano showed up with vibrant blond hair.
Then, another local player who calls himself a "hashtagger" for his skill in creating hashtags appeared and, on the spot, started creating the hashtag "#札幌discoverその先" (#SapporoDiscoverTheNextStep).
Mr. Koga and Mr. Sano began live-tweeting the study session using it. Before we knew it, the hashtag had spread, and people from all over Hokkaido were communicating.
It was a different world from my workplace, where even sending a single tweet requires approval from a manager and contacting the digital team... I was also excited, watching the tweets.

The study session began, and the initiator, Eifu Koga, started to talk about the events of that day.

How he woke up in the morning to find social media in an uproar and felt sad.
How he wanted to reconnect a divided society and asked a hashtagger he knew if they could do something.
How the idea of turning "dis" into "discover" was born. How a designer friend who saw the hashtag created a frame and a catchphrase for Twitter.
How friends started joining in one after another, using the frame to share Hokkaido's charms, contacting the mass media about the initiative, and so on.

The local players connected organically, without any particular planning, and the movement spread. The "#札幌discover" and "#北海道discover" hashtags created by Mr. Koga and his friends garnered 17,000 tweets within the month, with a total reach of 20 million. It's fair to say they rivaled the original "#札幌dis" hashtag.
This was the power of Hokkaido's local players.

Now, among the local players gathered that day, Kazuya Sano was one who commanded particular respect.
Mr. Sano was an entrepreneur who had been active, sometimes with anger, sometimes with sadness, about the difficulty of living happily in his region. After graduating from university, he worked for a major advertising agency but left to launch his own local media.
He gave off an impression of a mixture of darkness and purity.

What Are These "Local Friends"?

(Left: Kazuya Sano, Right: Eifu Koga)

Still buzzing with the excitement of the study session, we headed to a pub in Sapporo with the local players.
At the second bar, I met with Mr. Sano and brought up the idea of a program where NHK and local players would team up. It was a plan for NHK to feature local players in a five-minute program.

In response to that, Mr. Sano printed out the proposal for Local Friends at a convenience store. The central idea was that "Local Friends, who are networkers in the community, would introduce other people active in the community."

My proposal and Mr. Sano's proposal were similar, yet vastly different.
The difference was that the local people were the "main actors." Would the media introduce the local people? Or would the local people introduce other local people?

"What kind of program would this turn out to be?"
I headed home, filled with a strange feeling.

(The actual proposal. It explains in detail what role the Local Friends would play.)

The next day, as I was scanning the proposal on the copy machine, I felt as if something I had cherished as a TV professional was slipping away.

I joined NHK as a director in 2008 and have been involved in program production ever since.
During that time, one of the things drilled into me was that "the proposal is a director's lifeline."
Another was the pride of a journalist: "Know more about your subject than anyone else before you broadcast."

Was it okay to entrust reporting activities to local people? Was it even okay to go along with a proposal that didn't come from a director in the first place? I was hesitant.

On the other hand, it seemed certain that local people know their communities best. After all, I had only just come to Hokkaido that year.

While I was mulling this over, it was decided that Mr. Sano would come to the NHK Sapporo station to explain. Our team of seven or eight members waited nervously for his arrival.

And when Kazuya Sano finally arrived... his hair was black.
"Hey, did you get rid of the blond hair?" a team member asked. He had dyed it for his visit to NHK, he said, looking a bit embarrassed.

Interview with Kazuya Sano

Profile
Born in 1991 in Engaru, Hokkaido. After working at Hakuhodo and the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), and as a freelancer, he founded Torch Inc. in Sapporo, Hokkaido in 2020. He travels between Sapporo and his hometown in the Okhotsk area, working on business and brand development involving various media and communities. His goal is "to live a creative and joyful life, no matter where you are." He likes both dogs and cats. He is allergic to cats.

--Why did you decide to write the proposal?
I can say this now, but let me preface it (laughs). I wasn't sure if NHK's way of doing things would work out.
There are many different types of people involved in local activities. Among them, I wanted to shine a light on those who are doing small but steady work, so I decided to write the proposal.

--How did you develop the idea?
I was chatting with a senior from my hometown, Takuro Nakanishi (representative director of .doto), about how we entertain friends who visit from out of town. When we take them around to various local spots, they all go home "blown away" by the sheer concentration of local players. I thought it would be innovative if that kind of shock could be captured from a professional perspective. The idea was to have someone with an be guided around to meet interesting local people.

--The term "Local Friends" is a new coinage. How did you come up with it?
I thought it would be important to have someone who , and I knew I had to think of what to call them. I felt this would be crucial. Not a 'player,' but what? I thought something less formal, like 'friend,' would have the right sense of distance.
I was in a hot spring in Kiyosato Town in eastern Hokkaido (a town near the Shiretoko World Heritage site), thinking about various things, and it just came to me.

--Why did you dye your hair black before coming to NHK?
I thought I might be trusted a little more with black hair (laughs).

How could we get Mr. Sano's "Local Friends" concept approved as a project?

Inside the TV station, regular projects are already running, and everyone wants to get their new proposals approved. As we were racking our brains, a team member had an idea.
Let's slip it into the "trial period" for the evening news program.
By chance, a review meeting for the renewal of the evening news program was scheduled as part of a program supported by NHK headquarters. As far as I know, this was a rare event, happening only once every few years. It would be wrong to say we were taking advantage of the chaos, but it was undoubtedly a kind of "golden opportunity."

"But that's next month, right? And there's the New Year's holiday..."
"But it's our only shot."
And so, a program proposal titled "Marunage" (which roughly means "passing the buck" or "leaving it all to others") was approved within NHK and was set to be broadcast on a trial basis.

And that broadcast would work a miracle.
It would attract people who said, "I want to be a Local Friend, too."

These people were:
A freelance writer.
A Buddhist monk.
A company employee who paints cars.

They were all people who had never been involved in program production before.
The broadcast scene was becoming more and more chaotic. The adventure continues next time.

Author's Profile

Director, NHK Sapporo Station Ryo Osumi

Born in 1984 in Mishima, Shizuoka. Joined NHK as a director in 2008. He specializes in launching new projects and has developed programs such as "No-Nare" and "Professional Children's University." Since 2019, he has planned "Local Friends," "Shiraberuka," and "Moya Cafe (Obihiro Station)" in Hokkaido. For Local Friends, he has been involved in productions in Eastern Hokkaido, Hakodate, Date, Nakashibetsu, Shiretoko, Kiyosato, Soya, Kimobetsu, and Teshikaga. He may look young, but he is a father of two. He has been skiing for two years.

Materials provided by / sachi Production support / Yuriko Kikuchi Illustrations / Nao Sakamoto


"The Adventures of Local and Media"
(1) Using TV to Build a Community - Introduction